BEHIND THE SCENES:
MISCHA KUBALL
ReferenzRäume
Museum Morsbroich
5 December – 24 April 2022

PART I

You may remember we travelled to see this exhibition in its first appearance last summer in Wolfsburg. Here now in the Ruhr region of Germany, just outside Cologne/Düsseldorf we have a new version at Museum Morsbroich which we will see early next year. The important thing here is to stress again that this is the first retrospective overview of this artist’s long career to appear, and it is well worth seeing now that it is within an easy train trip of Paris or Brussels.

Also keep in mind Mischa Kuball is one of those artists who has worked between the genres, and between the locations of public/private in the grand sense of the “polis” as well as on the fringes of everything often taken to be the “art world.” Mischa Kuball has been for three decades colonizing the territory on the borders between things, be it the city streets and plazzas. The territory where the urban structure meets the human beings’ daily activities. His work has been for a long time a call to action, a call to thought, a large imaginary arrow pointing over here to places and conditions few artists have thought worthy of attention. That arena where the everyday mundane moments become patterns or digression.

This is precisely why this œuvre is so important and relevant today; in this world we see where the very values and concerns of our daily life, and our practice as human beings, is being bombarded by countless actors, some truthful and others less so. Where the lines between true and false are more and more blurred, and the power of casting doubt absorbs all the air in any room. We are in a fragile time. The climate is extreme whether it is actual storms or human disagreements. The middle ground does not feel as if it can possibly hold.

PART II

So it is not unusual for this kind of aesthetic path to wander back in time towards the evolution of art history itself, and particularly to the work of Aby Warburg which we remember today for different reasons, not least for the picture library which made up the bases for The Warburg Institute, that collected images in such a way that history could be read vertically by typologies rather than horizontally as in chronology.  Kuball takes this way of thinking, this slice or core sample as a material for work involving videos sliding into view of these famous Mnemosyne.

It is one of the highly complex works that make up this museum exhibition, many of them involve the relationship of architectural space and its social and political implications; installations, performances, photography, and projections primarily using light from a wide variety of length. In doing so he reflects the different dimensions of cultural and historical structures. He considers himself a conceptual artist who works in different media and spaces. “Light is sociology, light is politics.”

More info:

Mischa Kuball

Museum Morsbroich

Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl